Same thing happened to my prof last year. Many assignments were planned, however due to things out of our control we were not going to be able to do every assignment. The prof held an open forum during class to collect ideas from us (only about 20 in the class, so it was easily manageable). The final concencus was to have smaller assignments replace the larger ones and any spare % went to the exam. Students who had already started the assignment (started early) had the opportunity to present it to the prof and it was up to the prof to reward extra credit . All the students found this fair and so myself and one other student got extra credit because we started an assignment that was replaced/cancelled.
TLDR: Have an open forum with the students, present a few options and let them decide what is fair. Let them "argue" between each other in a mediated way to present the pros/cons of every option. Just remember it's not their fault, so every student needs to come out satisfied with the outcome.
In my school (University in Canada) you are not permitted to deviate from the syllabus unless every single student agrees. If even one student says no, you are not permitted to deviate. Often times profs will talk to these individuals and give them "incentive" to agree.
--EDIT--
Another thing you should do is talk to professors in your department to see what they do in situations like yours. By no means is your situation unique, and seeing what your fellow professors do and maybe even the school policy may be a good idea.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
In my syllabus there is series of writing assignments that are worth 10% of the final grade. Over the course of the semester there were supposed to be 4 assignments, however as a result of snow days and other extrinsic issues, the students have only turned in one of these assignments and I am not likely to be able to get any more in by the end of the semester.
Additionally, when I designed the assignment, I did not fully appreciate how difficult it would be for the students and how difficult it was going to be to grade. At this point it is only going to be reasonable for me to assign grades based on whether the student put some effort into the assignment (i.e., check+, check, check-, 0).
So I am left with the situation where 10% of a student's final grade could be the result of one assignment that was graded only on completion.
As I see it, this poses 2 problems:
The final grade of the students that did the assignment will be artificially inflated, and
the final grade of a student that missed the assignment for whatever reason will be reduced to a degree disproportional to the offence.
Is there a way to deal with this situation fairly?
(I have considered moving the assignment to another assignment group (e.g., counting it as a classwork assignment) but then I am not sure how to redistribute the orphaned points in a fair way.)